Ian Barbour first studied science, then religion, but instead of concluding that the two are in eternal conflict, he helped create an academic realm where they share common ground.

Dr. Barbour, who was 90 when he died on Dec. 24 in Minneapolis, earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago and then a divinity degree from Yale, and he never abandoned his passion for scientific exploration or his place in the pew. He embraced the complexities of evolution and the Big Bang theory, of genetics and neuroscience. He also embraced Christianity. He was a devoted parishioner at First United Church of Christ in Northfield, Minn.

In 1999, when he won the Templeton Prize, a prestigious award given annually to “a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension,” he said it was missing the point to focus on the supremacy of one over the other, to read either religious texts or scientific findings as comprehensive in their capacity to explain existence.

“If we take the Bible seriously but not literally,” he said in his acceptance address, “we can accept the central biblical message without accepting the prescientific cosmology in which it was expressed, such as the three-layer universe with heaven above and hell below, or the seven days of the creation story.”

He was well known for describing four prevailing views of the relationship between science and religion: that they fundamentally conflict, that they are separate domains, that the complexity of science affirms divine guidance and finally — the approach he preferred — that science and religion should be viewed as being engaged in a constructive dialogue with each other.

“This requires humility on both sides,” he wrote. “Scientists have to acknowledge that science does not have all the answers, and theologians have to recognize the changing historical contexts of theological reflection.”

Dr. Barbour seemed at ease in tension. He was a conscientious objector during World War II and later a teaching assistant to Enrico Fermi, a developer of the atomic bomb. When the nuclear age raised questions bigger than he could answer in a laboratory, he accepted a fellowship at Yale. One year led to two, and then the divinity degree. In 1955, his dual pursuits became one job: He was hired to teach physics and religion, though in separate classes, at Carleton College, in Northfield.

His first book, “Issues in Science and Religion,” was published in 1966, and for many people struggling to reconcile faith and science, it became something of a bible itself.

“It really transformed my life,” said Robert John Russell, who read the book when he was an undergraduate majoring in physics at Stanford. He later founded the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., to which Dr. Barbour donated most of the money he received for the Templeton Prize.

“Ian was the pioneer scholar who got us out of the quicksand of either seeing science and religion as totally in conflict or totally irrelevant to each other,” Dr. Russell said.

Dr. Barbour often said the news media’s interest in conflict tended to emphasize extreme positions, whether those of fundamentalists or atheists. In his later years, he asserted with pleasure that serious study of the middle ground was increasing within Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other faiths, judging by the number of books published, university courses taught, and programs on religion and science hosted by both the American Academy of Religion and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist and former Roman Catholic priest who won the Templeton in 2010 for his work arguing that religious faith and science are not in conflict, said Dr. Barbour “probably did more for the creation of the field than anyone else.”

Ian Graeme Barbour was born in Beijing on Oct. 5, 1923, the middle child of missionaries. His mother, the former Dorothy Dickinson, was an American schoolteacher and an Episcopalian. His father, George, was a Scottish geologist and Presbyterian who was involved in the discovery of the Peking man fossils.

Dr. Barbour, who was a British citizen until the 1950s, received a degree in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1943. After claiming conscientious objector status, he spent the next three years working in the Civilian Public Service, first fighting forest fires in Oregon and later working in a psychiatric hospital in North Carolina. While there, he enrolled in physics at Duke. He completed his graduate work in Chicago, working with Dr. Fermi, then spent four years teaching physics at Kalamazoo College, where he experimented with cosmic rays. He arrived at Yale in 1953.

While at Duke, he met Deane Kern, who was studying religion as an undergraduate. They married in 1947; she died in 2011. His survivors include two sons, David and John, who confirmed his death; two daughters, Blair Barbour and Heather Barbour; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Dr. Barbour wrote several other influential books, including “Myths, Models, and Paradigms” (1973) and two that were based on his presentations of the Gifford Lectures in Scotland: “Religion in an Age of Science” (1990) and “Ethics in an Age of Technology” (1993).

Even as he became prominent around the world, he remained deeply involved at Carleton. He was the first chairman of a newly created religion department in 1955 and went on to create interdisciplinary programs that spanned religion, environmentalism, technology and public policy. He retired from Carleton in 1986, but not from attending First United.

In an essay published in 2004, he described his church as “a community of acceptance, commitment and concern for social justice, centering in the person of Christ and the work of the spirit but remaining open to theological interpretation.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Ian Barbour, Who Found a Balance Between Faith and Science, Dies at 90. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe